Donald Trump speaking to the press on board Air Force One two days after an incendiary piece appeared in the New York Times by an anonymous senior aide.
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images

Anybody who has not yet read the opinion piece published in the New York Times by an anonymous “senior official” in Donald Trump’s administration should do so. To say the article casts Trump in a poor light is an epic understatement.

The US president is described, by someone who claims to work closely with him on a daily basis as an amoral, anti-democratic, erratic fool whose leadership style is “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective”. This results in “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions”, the writer says.

Such harsh criticism, from such a source, is exceptional, especially since the author claims to support Trump’s conservative agenda. For Trump’s opponents, in the US and abroad, it confirms their worst suspicions about a man they view as downright dangerous.

Trump’s response was angry and vainglorious. He proclaimed author and newspaper guilty of treason and demanded the culprit surrender to the Feds. Forget free speech. It was “off with their heads”. Maybe King Donald really does believe he wields monarchical powers.

Yet the president’s discomfort, and his detractors’ glee, should not obscure more serious issues raised by this affair and by similarly critical revelations contained in a new exposé by the celebrated Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.

Whatever one’s opinion of Trump, it is a matter of concern that unelected, unnamed officials are apparently willing and able to act in ways contrary to an elected president’s stated wishes and calculated to thwart his policies.

Trump’s worst instincts must undoubtedly be resisted, as Barack Obama, rejoining the fight last week, has declared. The best way to achieve that, as ever in a democracy, is through public scrutiny and open debate. Every leader needs candid advisers. But who are these self-described “adults in the room” to clandestinely decide what is in the best interests of the country?

Their motives may be sound, but their illicit actions, boasted of publicly, set a worrisome precedent. They have also gifted Trump a golden opportunity to peddle his favourite narrative of an establishment conspiring against him, aided and abetted by media organisations – which he terms “enemies of the people”. Speaking in Montana on Thursday, he seized his chance. “Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself,” he declared.

The anonymous writer tried to provide reassurance that things in the White House are not as bad as they seem. Woodward’s new book, Fear, suggests the exact opposite: they are worse. It describes a “Crazytown” of tantrums, endless crises, serial lying, unhinged behaviour, and an administration in a recurring state of nervous breakdown.

This is all deeply disturbing, and it raises another issue of constitutional importance: namely, is Trump morally, legally and mentally fit to serve as president? This conundrum brings with it basic questions about the workings of US democracy. Why, for example, does Congress continue to turn a blind eye, in many instances, to the executive branch’s disreputable shenanigans?

And is the likely confirmation of the ultra-conservative Trump nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, as a supreme court justice really what the founding fathers envisaged when they set out the separation of powers? Kavanaugh believes sitting presidents cannot be legally investigated. That suits Trump, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michael Cohen case.

Crazy is as crazy does. The president’s mad week began with his deserved exclusion from the funeral of John McCain, whose heroism he will never understand, and ended with wild tirades against independent journalists and other supposed rats and traitors.

How much longer will this carry-on up the Capitol be tolerated – or do Americans now think it normal? As the anonymous official put it: “The bigger concern is not what Mr Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us.”